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London's BT Tower Broadcasted Windows 7 Error Message Over the Weekend (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the technical-difficulties dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Generally a system crash is a private affair, but the BT Tower, one of London's tallest landmarks, spent much of the weekend displaying a Windows error message in a very public fashion. The building, originally known as the Post Office Tower, is famed for both its revolving top floor and, more recently, for the banks of LEDs at its summit that act as a very prominent billboard. Sadly for BT over the weekend it was showing what looks very like a Windows 7 error screen. "Choose operating system to start or press TAB to select a tool: (Use arrow keys to highlight your choice and then press ENTER)."

9 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by kriston · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.

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    Kriston

    1. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.

      Why bother? They're already monitored by dozens or hundreds of humans 24/7, most of which have cell phones and many of which will happily upload a photo of any malfunction to one or more of the major social-networking sites. All they really need to do is monitor social media for the appropriate keywords, and take action when they see posts appear.

      (On a more serious note: shouldn't a massively expensive electronic display like this have some sort of fail-safe mechanism that would do something reasonable in the event of a system crash? Even the lowly intersection stop-light has a watchdog that will automatically put it into blinking-red-stop-sign-emulator-mode when it detects a malfunction)

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      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    2. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by dwywit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A heartbeat service from another computer would have sufficed to send a message to someone.

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      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    3. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When this board fails, people post gibberish on social media. No one is going to die or be maimed. I don't mind discussion - people should be interested in the world around them - but lets not lose our minds.

      Yes, that's probably the answer -- that nobody really cares enough to implement a watchdog mechanism.

      Still, if I was one of the developers writing the sign software, I'd be embarrassed enough that I'd spend the extra time to make sure this failure mode never happens again (at least not on devices running my software).

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      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    4. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's probably not a software failure. More likely the PC running the software has been left on in the corner, gathering dust for years and years until it overheated and died. RAM failed, HDD crashed, cosmic ray flipped a bit in the CPU somewhere.

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      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by fgouget · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It could be that someone who could have done something about it had noticed but let it stay that way. Maybe general cynicism, dislike of Yankee OSes, thought it was funny, maybe they wanted to switch to Linux but the boss forbade it.

      Or they're not going to be paid overtime or even get a thanks if they come over the week-end.

  2. Befitting by quax · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sign of the Brexit times.

  3. Just stupid by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a simple fact that if you want a rock solid system that you shouldn't be bothering with any version of Windows. I know they don't have to use any exotic hardware either because those giant displays have FPGA based translators that take a simple video input (I used to chat with a guy who made them). A simple SBC running some Linux or BSD variant would have been the sane choice.

    Someone put in the minimum amount of effort into this display and it shows.

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    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  4. BSOD in 2008 Olympics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, during the opening ceremonies, a BSOD was projected in large characters, on a wall of the Bird's Nest. But in contrast to the message in London, I doubt the BSOD in Beijing stayed up very long.